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Douglas D. Osheroff - Biographical

Ethnically, I come from a mixed
family. My father was the son of Jewish immigrants who left
Russia shortly after the turn of the century, and my mother was
the daughter of a Lutheran minister whose parents were from what
is now Slovakia. Mostly, however, I grew up in a medical family.
My father's father and all his children either became physicians
or married them. My parents had met in New York where my father
was a medical intern and my mother was a nurse. At the end of
World War II, my parents settled in Aberdeen, a small logging
town on the west coast of Washington State, where medical doctors
were in short supply. Surrounded by natural beauty, it was a
perfect place to raise a family, and I was the second of five
children.

To this day I grow pale at the sight of blood, and never for a
moment considered a career in medicine. Despite this, my father,
who was usually engrossed in his medical career, inspired in me
passions for both photography and gardening, which were his
hobbies when time permitted, as they are mine. Natural science
interested me intensely from a very early age. When I was six I
began tearing my toys apart to play with the electric motors.
From then on, my free hours were occupied by a myriad of
mechanical, chemical and electrical projects, culminating in the
construction of a 100 keV X-ray machine during my senior year in
high school.

My projects often involved an element of danger, but my parents
never seemed too concerned, nor did they inhibit me. Once a
muzzle loading rifle I had built went off in the house, putting a
hole through two walls. On another occasion a make-shift
acetylene 'miners' lamp blew up on my chemistry bench in the
basement, embedding shards of glass in the side of my face,
narrowly missing my right eye. With blood running down my face, I
came up the stairs cupping my hands to keep the blood off the
carpet. My mother was by then at the top of the stairs. Knowing
my propensity for practical jokes, she exclaimed loudly "If
you're kidding I'll kill you! " As usual, my father lectured me
about safety as he sewed the larger wounds closed, and there was
always an unspoken understanding that that particular phase of my
experimentation was over.

In high school I was a good student, but only really excelled in
physics and chemistry classes. While I liked physics much more
than chemistry, the chemistry teacher, William Hock, had spent
quite a bit of time telling us what physical research was all
about (as opposed to my experimentation), and that effort made a
deep impression on my young mind. My interest in experimentation
helped me to develop excellent technical skills, but I did not
feel motivated to do independent reading in those areas of
physics or chemistry associated with my projects. I was
intellectually rather lazy, and in high school I would always
take one free class period so that I could get my homework out of
the way, freeing the evenings for my many projects.

My parents were generous, and the home for me was filled with
scientific toys and gadgets. In addition, their children were
allowed to attend any university to which they could get
admitted. I chose Caltech
over Stanford to avoid a
continuing comparison of my academic record with that of my older
brother, then a Stanford undergraduate.

It was a good time to be at Caltech, as Feynman was teaching his famous
undergraduate course. This two-year sequence was an extremely
important part of my education. Although I cannot say that I
understood it all, I think it contributed most to the development
of my physical intuition. The Feynman problem sets were very
challenging, but I had the good fortune to know Ernest Ma, who
was an undergraduate one year ahead of me. Ernest would never
tell me how to solve problems, but would give obscure hints when
I got stuck, at least they seemed obscure to me at the
time.

It was a shock to suddenly have to work so hard in my studies. I
had the most trouble in math, and only through considerable
trauma did I gradually improve my performance from a grade of C+
to A+ over a three-year period. Years later, when Caltech was
offering me a faculty position, I confided that I did not have a
very illustrious career as an undergraduate. To this remark the
division chair replied "That's OK Doug, we are not hiring you to
be an undergraduate."

The pressure at Caltech was extreme, and I am not sure I would
have survived had I not joined a group of undergraduates working
with Gerry Neugebauer on his famous infra-red star survey during
my junior year. This experience made me recognize how satisfying
research could be, and how different it was from doing endless
problem sets. In my senior year, in order to get out of a third
term of senior physics lab, I also began working in David Goodstein's
low temperature lab (David was in Italy). Two professors, Don
McCullum from U.C. Riverside
and Walter Ogier from Pamona College, were spending their sabbatical
leaves there trying to reach a temperature of 0.5K by pumping
on a helium bath in which the superfluid film had been carefully
controlled. They filled my mind with the wonders of the low temperature
world, and I decided I would go into solid state physics.

I chose to attend Cornell
for graduate school largely because it was so far away from the
Pasadena smog. In the end, it was a good choice, and a good time
to be at Cornell. Soon after my arrival I met two people who were
to become very important in my life. While still looking for
housing, I met Phyllis Liu, a pretty young woman from Taiwan, who
had also just arrived in Ithaca. We dated a bit, but then she
found herself too busy with her studies for such diversions. We
met again three years later, and were married in August, 1970,
two weeks after she obtained her Ph.D. The other person was
David Lee, the head of the low
temperature laboratory at Cornell and the professor under whom I
was to work as a teaching assistant my first year. Dave seemed to
think that I was bright, and encouraged me to join the low
temperature group.

Low temperature physics seemed even more exciting at Cornell than
it had been at Caltech. New technologies and interesting physics
made the field easy to choose, and I found myself thoroughly
enjoying every minute of my work. In the spring of my fourth year
Dave Lee asked me to talk to the Bell Labs recruiter, who came to
campus in the fall and spring of each year. I was not ready to
graduate, but we talked a bit, especially about making tiny
electrical plugs to be used throughout the Bell Telephone system.
It seemed interesting to me, although not really physics. In the
fall, Dave suggested I start interviewing in earnest. I first
talked with General Electric, who seemed to have no jobs
whatsoever. I then talked to Bell Labs again, but this time to a
new recruiter, Venky Narayanamurti, who had recently received his
Ph.D. in physics at Cornell. Venky was enthusiastic about what I
was doing, and felt that I might be able to get a postdoc doing
Raman spectroscopy. I didn't confess that I knew nothing about
the subject.

We discovered our mysterious phase transitions in my Pomeranchuk
cell in November 1971, and almost by magic, Venky called me up in
early December with good news. The hiring freeze which had been
in place for almost two years at Bell had been lifted. How soon
could I be ready to come down for a job interview? I told Venky
that we had stumbled on to something that was pretty exciting,
and we fixed the date: January 6, 1972.

At Bell Labs, a job interview began with a thesis defence, and it
could at times turn nasty. I was lucky that no one questioned my
association of the A and B features with the solid. In
particular, Dick Werthamer was in the audience, and he had done
early work on the p-wave BCS state soon to be associated with the
B phase. I think my enthusiasm carried the day, and ultimately
Bell Labs offered me not a postdoc position in Raman
spectroscopy, but a permanent position which would allow me to
continue my studies on 3He.

Phyllis and I moved to New Jersey in September, 1972; Phyllis to
a postdoc position at Princeton University, and I to
Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill. This was the golden era at Bell
Labs. The importance of the transistor, invented in the research
area there, made management extremely supportive of basic
research. The only requirement was that work done should be 'good
physics' in that it changed the way we thought about nature in
some important way. I joined the Department of Solid State and
Low Temperature Research under the direction of C. C. Grimes, and
began purchasing the equipment I would need to continue what I by
then knew were studies of superfluidity in 3He. Some
instrumentation was even purchased before I arrived in New
Jersey. Yet I knew it would take at least a year to set up my
laboratory, and I feared that most of the important pioneering
work would be done before my own lab became operational.

I was surprised to find that by the time my laboratory did become
operational, few of the studies that interested me had been done.
Indeed, there seemed to be some question as to whether or not
these new phases were all p-wave BCS states. In addition,
theorists Phil Anderson and Bill
Brinkman at Bell Labs had become interested in the theory of
superfluid 3He. This set the stage for what was to be
an extremely productive period in my career. Over a five year
period, beginning in 1973, we measured many of the important
characteristics of the superfluid phases which helped identify
the microscopic states involved. We found the superfluid phases
to be almost unbelievably complex, and at the same time extremely
well described by the BCS theory and extensions to that theory
developed during that period.

In about 1977 I began to feel pressure from Bell Laboratories
management to go on to study other physical systems. I decided to
study solid 3He, my original thesis topic, and at the
same time Gerry Dolan and I began a modest program to test some
of the ideas that David Thouless had discussed on electron
localization in disordered one-dimensional systems. This latter
study had to fit within the extremely slow time scale of the
solid 3He work. By late 1979, both of these efforts
had succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. We discovered
antiferromagnet resonance in nuclear spin ordered solid
3He samples which we grew from the superfluid phase
directly into the spin-ordered solid phase. At the same time, the
low temperature group at the University of Florida also discovered
these resonances, but because we cooled our samples by adiabatic
nuclear demagnetization of copper rather than Pomeranchuk
cooling, only we were able to form and study single crystals, and
could thus identify the allowed magnetic domain orientations. In
the end, Mike Cross, Daniel Fisher and I were able to determine
the symmetry of the magnetic sub-lattice structure, and correctly
guessed the precise ordered structure, later confirmed by
polarized neutron scattering. The frequency shifts resulting from
this antiferromagnetic resonance have made solid 3He
an extremely useful model magnetic system, and to understand them
theoretically, we had borrowed some of the same formalism which
Leggett used to
understand the frequency shifts in superfluid
3He.

At almost the same time that Cross, Fisher and I made our
breakthrough in our solid 3He studies, Dolan and I
discovered the log(T) temperature dependence to the electrical
resistivity in disordered 2D conductors which Phil Anderson and
his 'gang of four' had just predicted would exist, as a result of
what they termed 'weak localization'. I did not continue the work
on weak localization, as I only had one cryostat, and to do so
would have meant that I could not continue my studies on nuclear
spin ordering in solid 3He, since the two sets of
experiments would have vastly different time scales. Somewhat
ironically, I got a second cryostat two years later.

In 1987, after fifteen years, I left Bell Laboratories to accept
a position at Stanford University. I had received informal offers
of university positions periodically while at Bell Labs, but
always found Bell to be the ideal place to do research. The
combination of in-house support for basic science and first rate
collaborators made Bell Labs unbeatable as an environment for
doing research. However, my wife recognized in me a teacher
waiting to be born. In addition, she was not happy with her job
in New Jersey, and we agreed that she would apply for positions
elsewhere. When she received offers from two biotech companies in
California, Amgen and Genentech, I suggested that she accept the
Genentech offer and that I would start talking to Stanford and
U.C. Berkeley. Stanford,
which has a small physics department, had just begun a search for
a low temperature physicist. Ultimately, I received offers from
both institutions, and chose Stanford because we liked the
atmosphere better, and it was a better commute for Phyllis.

At Stanford my students and I have continued work on superfluid
and solid 3He, studying how the B superfluid phase is
nucleated from the higher temperature A phase and diverse
properties of magnetically ordered solid 3He in two
and three dimensions. In addition, we have developed a program to
study the low temperature properties of amorphous solids. Our
work has shown that interactions between active defects in these
systems create a hole in the density of states vs. local field,
just as is seen in spin-glasses. In amorphous materials, it may
be possible to measure the size of coupled clusters of such
defects, something which has been difficult in
spin-glasses.

I have thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of university life, except
for having to apply for research support. In particular, I have
been fortunate to have had excellent graduate students, and to be
able to teach bright undergraduates. Of course, with
undergraduates one always has a few students who do not
appreciate the professor's efforts. In 1988, after teaching my
first large lecture course, one student wrote in his course
evaluation: "Osheroff is a typical example of some lunkhead from
industry who Stanford University hires for his expertise in some
random field." Despite this minority opinion, in 1991 Stanford
presented me their Gores Award for excellence in teaching. From
1993-1996 I served as Physics Department chair, and stepped down
in September 1996, hoping to spend more time with my graduate
students. The day I learned I was to receive the Nobel Prize,
after just two and a half hours sleep the night before, I taught
my class on the physics of photography, although the lecture was
not on photographic lenses, but the discovery of superfluidity in
3He.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate.